lca: O(log h) Online Lowest Common Ancestor Search

This package provides a reference implementation of my skew binary random access algorithm for performing an
online lowest common ancestor in logarithmic time without preprocessing. This improves the previous known
asymptotic bound for this problem from O(h) to O(log h), where h is the height of the tree. Mostly
importantly this bound is completely independent of the width or overall size of the tree, enabling you to
calculate lowest common ancestors in a distributed fashion with good locality.

While algorithms exist that that provide O(1) query time, they all require O(n) preprocessing, where n is
the size of the entire tree, and so are less suitable for LCA search in areas such as revision control where the
tree is constantly updated, or distributed computing where the tree may be too large to fit in any one computer’s
memory.

Contact Information

Please feel free to contact me through github or on the #haskell IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

-Edward Kmett

Changes

0.3

Updated to build without warnings in the wake of GHC 7.10.

Use (and re-export) the new overloaded null and length from Prelude on GHC 7.10+

Modified mkeep, mdrop and mlca to parameterize them by monoid homomorphisms. This permits cheaper summaries to be calculated over the dropped path, when only a portion of the information in the path is required.

0.2.4

Fixed a bug in path reconstruction

0.2.3

Improved documentation to also note that this package also provides an improvement in the online version of the level ancestor problem.